


Probability Engine

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Character Study, M/M, POV Second Person, not sequel compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:53:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23151274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: The worst part about knowing you will have to shove Merrick Tremayne into the path of an oncoming cannonball is that you genuinely enjoy the man's company. Unfortunately, this becomes something of a recurring theme.Or: Keita Mori, inside out.
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton, Raphael/Merrick Tremayne (implied)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 113





	Probability Engine

**Author's Note:**

> I started this last year thinking it could be for Yuletide, missed sign-ups completely, and then somehow it was March. As such, this is NOT compliant with third book, nor are there any spoilers for it.
> 
> In its original draft, this fic started as a bunch of notes that Mori wrote to himself. That changed, but the second person POV remained. We'll say it's a metaphor, or something.
> 
>  **Disclaimer** : I am as Japanese as Natasha Pulley is.
> 
>  **Warnings** : mild period-typical attitudes and microaggressions. canon-compliant levels of character death. small crimes against the dutch.

*

*

*

PROBABILITY ENGINE  
by kaikamahine

*

*

*

When you wake, the ghosts of your future productivity have already started moving around you, judgmentally, which makes it very hard to get back to sleep.

With a faint noise of complaint, you get up to become one of them. 

Outside your door, the floorboards tell you they’re going to squeak and you step over them to get down the stairs. The house around you is having its own conversation with the wind, creaking as the rising humidity swells its joints. You’re glad it was Knightsbridge, this street in particular with its leaning wooden houses, and not Kensington, or somewhere just as awful; you don’t know what stone would have told you. Time doesn’t happen to stone the way it happens to you. Wood is downright chatty in comparison.

Later, when Thaniel comes down, the light on the floor has changed shape. Steam escapes from under the lid of the pot on the stove, making the kitchen smell warm, close, and damp, like cooking rice.

“Good morning,” you say.

Thaniel gives you a bleary look and accepts the kettle.

“Good morning, thought the rule was no English first thing,” he says, clunky from sleep, and you switch, saying, “right, sorry, habit.” You already have a bowl in hand when Thaniel reaches for it, and the smile he gives you for it is startled, pleased, like he’s forgotten you could and it’s the same sudden delight, every time.

*

You are … well, you are what you are, and your mother had been one, too.

Not to the same degree, it’s true. Where your memory is clear and goes for miles, hers had been more astigmatic, near-sighted. She saw future events only as they pertained to her — other people, places, nations, they were blurrier and further away.

You imagine this is part of the reason why you exist. She saw the formula, she saw it could be improved upon, and she saw the steps she had to take. The timing could have been better, she acknowledged, in that wry, understated way you will always hear in your own voice, later. She only had a narrow window of opportunity with which to arrange an assignation with the man who fathered you — someone you know less than nothing about. There’s no future in which you meet. He contributed nothing to you, except for how your mother rearranged the future to put them together. You could have easily never happened at all.

When the new year came and Lord Mori returned from a summit in Edo, going straight to the shrine to greet the house gods and apologize for being away so long, his wife met him there, already six months gone and no way to excuse it — they were well past the point of keeping it a secret, everyone in the castle already knew. There was only one thing to be done. She put her forehead to the ground to meet it.

But he had grown to appreciate her and her prescience, uncomfortable as it sometimes was, and she’d done him the useful service of bearing him five legitimate sons already. 

His own decision surprised him. Your mother said it felt like a snap, a broken neck unbreaking.

He banished her to a dark corner of Hagi Castle where no servants went, where she was allowed to live the remainder of her life as she pleased, so long as she saw no one — this was suitable punishment, he felt, removing a clairvoyant from the middle of her web. Or it would have been if your mother hadn’t already planned for it. 

Whenever anyone spoke of her to you, they spoke of her as if she was already dead. When you were younger, you went through a phase where you thought they must be right; if you could see other things that no one else could see, why not ghosts, too?

You look just like her, everyone tells you. It’s uncanny.

(For awhile, you wonder if _you_ might the ghost, not her. People sure do have a habit of looking at you like you’re haunting them.)

*

By the time you’re old enough to speak, you already remember Mandarin and English, and you start remembering Russian when it becomes likely enough that invasion and conquest will come down from Hokkaido for you know its language, but your mother makes you learn Japanese the right way forward, like you’re any other child.

You sit on your legs until your feet go numb, until the hiragana for “ma” and you are the same. “A” is the confusion of an open mouth, yelling.

“The future is too easy to lose,” she tells you, correcting your grip and humming down the short, subvocal frustrated noises you’re making. Your hands are too clumsy to make the brushstrokes look the way you’ve been doing them all your life.

“But —” you start.

“ _And,”_ she lets you go, settling back onto her heels, “you need something that will remain should everything else go dark.”

*

The whole of your childhood you spend this way, inexpert and overwhelmed, as the next several decades of your life crowd around as a whole clamoring, cantankerous cacophony inside your head. You don’t get the respite of old men, with only the long memories of their own life to try and sleep with; you are hounded by the memories of a hundred versions of yourself, all the people you can be. You feel crippled by your body — four years old, then five and six, short and cumbersome and too young to be taken seriously, even by you. A lifetime of sense memory exists in muscles too new to support them. You reach for glasses that aren’t on your face, you’re careful of a broken wrist you’ll get catching a niece you don’t have, you hunt through baskets for things that haven’t been invented yet. You’ve got a song stuck in your head that Thaniel won’t play for you for another forty years.

It would have been unbearable —

If you had to do it alone.

Without your mother, you can’t imagine how you would have learned. She makes it commonplace, another thing that you can be taught right alongside everything else — how to serve tea in the precise way a daimyo’s household expects, how to tie ceremonial knots in kimonos and how to get the blood out of them again, how to use your own intent to alter the outcome of a particular future. She shows you how to put your eye to the kaleidoscope of memory and turn it around to see which patterns you want to come true.

The two of you have four rooms, a cellar, a vegetable garden, and a narrow envelope-shaped patch of sky between the building and the outer wall. This is sufficient for the majority of your needs, but everything else you have to raid from the main house. It’s easy to do — the two of you know exactly where everyone will be before you cross under the inner wall, and exactly how much you can take before someone notices it’s missing. In this way you gather books, paper, teacups, tools and a violin, a set of jeweler’s utensils for you and your mother’s favorite plum cakes that the cook will assume your brothers took.

Once, when you’re about seven — old enough, now, to have climbed the wall and seen the town below, to have caught glimpses of the servants and your brothers and their father’s attendants and understand your own exclusion to it, even if the “why” isn’t something your mother intends to tell you yet, therefore you cannot know it — you stop and you say, “why is this important?” about some peculiarity of etiquette she’s correcting you on. This bit got much easier for you once you gained the ability to articulate.

“Because it’s necessary,” your mother says shortly, unwilling to be derailed.

You derail her anyway. “But _why._ I’ll never be lord of this castle. It’s not likely I’ll even see the eastern estate. I’m not a Mori.”

“So? You’ll be a part of this house.”

“I’m a bastard on the wrong side.”

She pauses, and on her face a brief struggle between her pride and her practicality plays out, but the chance of the entire shape of Japan — of the world — changing to allow her illegitimate son to be a samurai or bannerman or the daimyo himself is so slim she cannot even pass it off as a possible future.

“Maybe so,” she agrees, slowly, “but you may need to be smarter than those that are.”

You nod. That makes perfect sense.

*

Sometimes, quietly, the same way someone would pick at hangnail for lack of other occupation, your mother sits still and spins her rise back to prominence, tugging even the unlikeliest of futures into place to make it happen. She doesn’t realize your vision extends far enough to see them, not at first, because she’ll stop the second she does — it’s just that she misses the life she could have had, she misses the sons that aren’t you, and it’s a sore spot, knowing that she could grab it all back.

You know who she could have been, if she’d decided not to bring you into existence.

But she did, and she named you Joy in spite of it all.

*

“Keita.” 

“Hmm?”

Thaniel shifts his head along the back of the armchair, trying catch your eye. “Have you seen your own death?”

You frown. Bringing him into focus requires you to distinguish up from down, and that … seems to be a little bit beyond your grasp at the moment. Instead, you see the bottle on the filigree table that’s between you. Uncertain how it got there, you reach for it. It seems disastrously light.

The room keeps pitching side-to-side, and you put your other hand out to steady yourself. You feel like a cork in water, which is peculiar, because you’re pretty sure you’re not actually moving.

“How did this get here?” you want to know.

“It was a gift. Did you hear me?”

You remember now. It’s champagne. A very expensive champagne (at least, Thaniel tells you it’s expensive, and you’re inclined to trust his judgement) that had been given to you as a thank you from the owner of the Boar at Arms. You’d made a clockwork mouse for his daughter, who’d seen her mother die in a kitchen fire — a fact the man intended to bring up if you refused the commission, but of course you didn’t. The toy would have the same anti-anxiety effect for her as the one you made for Thaniel after the bombing.

You hadn’t intended on doing anything with the champagne except put it up somewhere high and bring it out the next time someone stupidly got engaged, but when you remarked as such to Thaniel, he didn’t rise to the bait. He stayed unsettlingly subdued all through dinner.

“No, it’s fine,” you say, because Thaniel’s creeping doubt is about to open his mouth for him and say, _you don’t have to answer if that was rude._ “And no. You can’t very well remember anything once you’re dead, can you? I remember things until I don’t remember them anymore.”

“It just ends?”

Thaniel doesn’t sound as drunk as you, which is annoying. But fair. There’s considerably more of him, and all of it is draped bonelessly in your armchair.

“If it’s in the immediate future, yes,” you say. “Otherwise, my last memory is typically as close to my death as your first memory is to your birth.”

There’s a pause while you both contemplate this. You’re actually kind of proud that came out of your mouth in the right order. You touch it experimentally; it doesn’t quite feel like it’s a part of your face, swollen and numb.

“And there are so many possible futures,” he finishes the thought. “That sounds …”

 _Awful,_ a near future says for him, with an uncomfortable amount of sympathy. You flinch from it, so he diverts, “… complicated.”

“It’s easier now that I’m older,” you tell him.

“Why’s that?”

You smile, rueful. “The older you get, the fewer futures you have.”

*

He misses Six.

Seeing the cautious delight on the face of the publican’s daughter when you presented her with the toy mouse, as if she didn’t quite trust that she had any enthusiasm left even as the toy squeaked and puffed steam in her palm, had made him homesick for Six. That’s why you opened the champagne, instead of putting it up.

Adopting children, it turns out, doesn’t work the same way choosing a puppy would. However little the workhouse might care about fulfilling the physical or emotional needs of its inmates, they drew the line at willingly signing over a five-year-old girl to someone they saw as a harbinger of the yellow peril, no matter how rich you are. Thaniel, a divorcé, is even worse. That’s _moral,_ that is.

He took it personally.

“You’re acting like I don’t have a plan,” you said to him, watching him fume.

Not long after, Six found herself on the receiving end of an academy scholarship — what a lucky draw, hm, but they do hold those kind of positions open, and sometimes not just nominally. She tells you about it while you’re visiting a new pop-up menagerie in Hyde Park, some India Company expedition from the Congo. She doesn’t look pleased, and you don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t trust the windfall, she doesn’t like school, or if she’s not fond of the sight of bedraggled, rained-on monkeys in cages. The killer ants in their large glass ant farm, however, make her ecstatic.

She’s there now, receiving the same kind of education Thaniel’s nephews are. You and Thaniel visit her one Sunday a month — you’re laying the foundations to steal her and fudge the paperwork later, but for right now you just tell her to put the spoons back. She acts like she can’t hear you, waiting to jump out at Thaniel as he comes around the corner. He falls down, pretending to be much more surprised than he is. She shows him a thin sliver of teeth, pleased.

He accepts her hand, letting her tug him upright, and you aren’t sure how to reassure him that it’ll work out. 

In all likelihood. Probably.

*

Here’s how it works.

You remember your recent future the way other people remember their recent past. The things that happen tomorrow are as fresh on your mind as the things that happened yesterday, and things that will happen in a matter of minutes you feel on your body like they’ve only just occurred: raindrops on your arms, or a knife to your throat, or a pinch from the plates in Katsu’s arms interlocking wrong. Fingers, bruising into your wrist. Your skull, exploding in pain before the brick is swung. The hairs on your body already standing on end, your breath short, before you are even kissed.

The further away a future is, the more dimly you remember it — the same way you cannot remember the exact details of a day ten years ago, only that you were there and this is how it effected you.

You remember several possible futures until the moment the future becomes the past, and then you forget every future that wasn’t the one that came true. It means you’re almost always acting as as archaeologist to your own life, trying to piece together what possible future you saw that motivated you to build this locust clock, or that music box, or all those beehives behind your townhouse in Shibuya. It didn’t happen, so you don’t remember why.

Remembering somebody else’s future is more like skipping a stone across a still pond.

You can look straight down the path the skipping stone takes until it sinks into the memory of the biggest, most pivotal moment of their lives — and everyone has one, whatever they may think, something that acts as the spine in the book of themselves — or you can pull back and watch one of the ripples expand to see how long they last, in what direction they’ll go.

It is, in fact, very similar to the way Thaniel describes his synesthesia. It’s an instinct, knowing if something is right or wrong just by the color of it.

It’s being unable to see around it, sometimes.

*

English becomes your barometer.

“Good morning,” is the first thing you say, always — in Thaniel’s accent, Thaniel’s inflection that has people going “oh, a Yorkshire lad?” in a way that makes Thaniel look very patiently at the ceiling — because the English you’ve spoken all your life you’ll learn from him. Everyone is an unconscious amalgamation of their friends’ mannerisms, after all, and Thaniel has always been your closest one.

(“You don’t sound very polished,” your employer, a Mr Tremayne, remarks to you once when you are about twelve, after a run-in with a bunch of schoolboys from the consulate in Calcutta, where everybody speaks English as primly as a diplomat, and since you know he’s not talking about your fluency, you say, “you only think that because you’re a southern tart,” just to shock him into laughter.)

Eventually, the home you share will forget its rule about no English at dawn, and your day does not properly start unless you are heating water for tea and Thaniel’s checking on the rice and one or the other of you says, “good morning,” because it is. It will be.

If there’s ever a time you rise and cannot remember the words, that’s your warning that something intends to kill you, and soon, before you ever meet Thaniel. You know to be on the lookout.

*

Sometimes, you write them down.

The interesting ones, or the ones that need more explanation than you think you’ll remember, or the ones you really want to avoid. You expect to live as long as is necessary, barring a lightning strike or any random-gear bombs, but _only_ as long as necessary. You have no desire to end up a fossil that walks and talks still just for the sake of longevity.

Thaniel moves around in the kitchen behind you, checking the pots on the sideboard to see if they’ve dried before putting them away, and you hear him open a cabinet drawer and then make an abrupt, subvocal noise you’re becoming increasingly familiar with. 

It means, _I should be surprised but I’m not._

You turn around in your chair, and he shows you your set of stacked bamboo steamers with two clockwork pears inside.

You clearly had put them there at some point. You have no memory of doing so.

“… I’m sure I had a good reason,” you say, judiciously.

“Mmhmm.” Thaniel evicts the pears, nests the baskets inside the pot, and puts it all away. “You made them for your old tutor, you said?”

“Yes. He’s a gardener. He wanted to show his saint the kinds of fruit that don’t grow in the Andes, and clockwork keeps much better than a crate of the real thing. Easier to transport, too. I found it soothing, and just … kept making them.”

“What did he tutor you in? Religion? Botany?”

“What?” You look at him funny. “No. He was an opium smuggler when I knew him.”

“Oh, of course. Silly me.”

There’s a pot of jam still on the table. You glance at your spoon, then it, then him, to let him know you would not miss. He rolls his eyes, utterly unthreatened, and turns back to the sideboard.

Your gaze sticks on him. There’s nothing there you haven’t remembered a hundred times over — you’re not sure if he’d be considered attractive or not, objectively, as everything about him tends towards largeness without concerning itself on whether it fit with the rest; his hands (the first thing you noticed about him, for no particular reason,) his shoulders (especially now that he’s eating decently,) and his features, too, crowding for space on his face. (You have no idea why white people have the noses they do, cutting through the air in front of them like the prow of a ship. Was it in case they needed to split wood but didn’t have an axe on hand? That _would_ explain some of their behavior, actually) — but it takes a moment before you can look away. 

You pull one of the pears towards you, turning it over. It has a dent in it, where the seams don’t quite line up, and you run your thumb over it. 

In your journal, upstairs, you have a future written down — one of the ones that had been likely at the time you wrote it, and then evaporated all at once. In it, you were much older than you are now, and you had a visitor come to see you at Filigree Street. A girl — all right, woman, she was probably about thirty or so, but once one attains a certain age then everyone seems stupidly young, and you reached that point by the time you were ten — who came to the shop with a suitcase full of these same clockwork pears.

“We found these when we were cleaning my father’s things out of the attic,” she’d said with no preamble, setting the suitcase down down proprietarily on top of her feet and glancing around — slowly, with absorbing interest. 

“Oh?” you’d said, knowing what was coming.

“He just passed away. These looked expensive, and your address was inside, so.”

Thaniel’s daughter hadn’t looked like him at all, until she turned her head and then suddenly there he was, all those features put back into the right proportions. At that point, in that timeline, you didn’t remember your future with him, except for the places you had it written down, so it didn’t kill you on the spot the way it would have otherwise. 

It wasn’t a bad future, you think. You hadn’t died alone in that one, at least.

*

More than the bizarre ones, though, or the ones that frighten you, your journal is especially for the futures you want to keep.

You had it a long time before you wrote about Thaniel. He wouldn’t enter your life until 1884 and you had a lot of things you had to live through first, it’s true, but also ... you were reluctant. What if you wrote it down, promising yourself all of that peace, all of that happiness (and all right, yes, fine, the sex, too, you needed to learn it from somewhere and it might as well be from your future self) and then one day you opened to that page and didn’t recognize Thaniel’s name at all?

But then, in that miserable stretch of time between your brothers dying and Ito coming with his accountants to mortgage Hagi Castle, you make a note to yourself about Akira and Grace — which means you have to tell yourself why it matters.

Before you know it, it all comes pouring out of you, a whole frantic racing scrawl, up and down, page after page after page.

_Matsumoto Akira won’t realize what he wants until he’s no longer of any significance to her at all._

_Carrow Grace will be wrong about everything, but she won’t be wrong about needing a laboratory of her own, and she won’t be wrong that Thaniel needs her money. They’ll get what they want if they marry each other, and will have so much less to be afraid of, and that’s a kind of happiness, too. Don’t interfere._

_Thaniel will not stay if he is told who made the bombs._

_Sunday, late October, 1885. Will spend whole day in bed. Will not be more than an arm’s length from him. Will not run out of things to talk about. Will laugh until it hurts. One of the best days of your life._

*

Thaniel laughs when you laugh, the same way some people start crying when they see other people are crying, as if you’ve given him permission. 

(You find yourself laughing a lot more, once you notice that.)

His shoulders are freckled even though none of the rest of him is, like he’d been drawn into place and someone had tried to brush away the pencil shavings but didn’t succeed, leaving little flecks behind. You want to learn them with your fingertips. You want to learn them with your tongue.

*

Most of all, you want there to be a record.

That you, Mori Keita, bastard on the wrong side, are loved to the point of belly-aching laughter by somebody, and that somebody is Nathaniel Steepleton. 

Even if the only person who sees it is yourself, you want someone to know it exists, that love —

And that you made it come true at the expense of all other futures.

*

A few weeks after the Nakamura’s firework shop explodes, when your stitches have fallen out and you’ve even managed the stairs long enough to sweep the cobwebs out from where your house has been complaining about them, you take a bag and you go to France.

“I’ll be back before the award ceremony,” you tell Thaniel, who’s getting dressed for work.

He stops, shirttails drifting down around his pockets, and mouths _award ceremony?_ at you in confusion.

“Oh.” You reach out, pinning the points of his collar. You already have the pins for them, and you’re pleased to find that this is why you grabbed them. Your arms cross over his so that he can finish buttoning his shirt. “The Foreign Office and the Tokyo diplomats want to honor you for saving Ito’s life. Fanshaw’s going to tell you today or tomorrow, sorry, I thought they already did.”

His mouth purses, but not at you. The whole thing embarrasses him still.

You almost think he _would_ have preferred it if you’d maneuvered him into saving Ito’s life. That would have made sense to him, that he was a cog you dropped into the works so everything would tick along smoothly, instead of having to come to grips with the notion that he saved Ito’s life because he’s the kind of person who saves lives.

Shirttails rescued and tucked in, he steals the opportunity to slip his fingers around your wrists and hold them to his chest for a moment, and then just as quick releases you, ears red.

You leave smiling.

You go to France because you need to sabotage a train, and also because there’s going to be a cabal in Paris of war officers who supported the shogun during the the civil war that cost you your brothers. Tokugawa Yorinobu turned to France for aid on the assumption that any nation that produced Napoleon had to be the right ally to pick, which was not a decision that aged well. You need to be in that meeting because everyone there who’s Japanese knows who you are. They’ve heard the rumor that you dropped a wall on your cousin because he hit you, that you threatened Ito’s wife to get out of your contract and that Kuroda Kiyotaka, a cartoon bully, is the Minister of War because you want him to be. Everyone there remembers your mother.

So you show up — uninvited — and you sit in the room and tinker idly with the selection of sugars and jams. Everyone tries to pretend you aren’t there. 

You build a small replica locomotive out of sugar cubes. The French keep frowning.

Slowly, the intentions fizzle out of likelihood.

Matsumoto-sama was supposed to have sent his son in lieu of himself, hoping to keep it secret from the emperor’s men, but Matsumoto Akira won’t make it because you sabotaged the train he was on and he decided, at the station, that what he really wanted to do was go back and convince the soon-to-be former Mrs Steepleton to marry him instead. He’s not here to promise money to anyone.

The future shifts its shape around you, and, pleased, you go home.

In your absence, London has worked itself up into a good grey sulk, the kind of persistent drizzle that one never thinks they need their umbrella for until they’re already soaked, the kind that turns paper to pulp in the unfortunate time it takes one to remember where they last saw their book. Inside 27 Filigree Street, you collect from the worktable the calling cards you’d already replied to on the way from the station. You debate whether it’s worth getting started on any of it, and then you step down into the kitchen to make two cups of tea.

Thaniel sees the lights on in the workshop from the end of the street. His relief balloons in him so strongly you feel it from three shops away, as warm as putting your hands to a hot kettle. You immediately forget the possible future where he’d come to his senses in your absence.

When he steps inside, his eyes are already scratching at the scenery to find you.

“Keita,” he sheds his rain-freckled coat. “You’re home.”

And you say, “mmh,” because your mouth is — will be, in about ten seconds — otherwise occupied.

He knocks the rainwater from his hat, and leaves his shoes tucked in next to yours, and in his stocking feet he follows you down the shallow steps into the kitchen, where he turns you around before you can offer him the still-steaming cup of tea and kisses you all across the mouth.

The window in the kitchen doesn’t face the street. It’s set high over the sink, the glass the same small imperfectly warped kind most of these medieval houses have, and before Katsu disappeared it was his favorite escape route into the backyard, where the pollen-fireflies from Peru would set off if anyone came close enough to be a danger. The two of you have gotten to thinking of the kitchen as a safe place to be.

He slides one hand around the back of your neck to hold you still and walks you backwards, one step and another, kissing your mouth several times in quick succession — too enthusiastic to give you much of a chance to kiss him back.

“Hi, hello,” he punctuates them with, “how are you, how was France?”

You hold onto his elbows for balance. 

“Good,” you try to say, without much success, “I mmh, I brought back entremets.”

The promise of sugar and jam makes him pause long enough to check, to which you’re forced to admit, “I haven’t made them yet.”

His expression at once goes wistfully, overwhelmingly fond, and since you’re right up next to it it makes you want to do something drastic, like pull down a building or bite his eyebrow or tell him you love him.

Your hands shake, and you grab him by the ears.

You kiss him properly — frenchly, so deeply your ancestors probably have something to say about it.

He steps you back against the table, then follows you down onto it, at which point you have to break away from him to rescue the teacups, because they’re your mother’s good stolen china and they haven’t done anything to deserve this.

You inform him as such — yes, Thaniel, stolen, you can’t grow teacups in the vegetable garden and that was the set least likely to get the steward executed for losing, yes their value is incalculable but not for the reasons you think — but even the brief separation has your skin clamoring, bereft, as if every inch of you is made of chain-links too fine to be seen and all of it is buzzing. You’ve never been more aware of it, how much skin you possess and how desperately untouched it is right now. You want to press all of it to him. You want the future to get here, _now._

“Why haven’t you asked me for anything?” you gasp, once you get him back.

“Hm?”

You’ve pulled his shirt from his trousers, rucking it up around your wrists so you can get your hands on him, and you go a little stupid with it.

“You know what I can do, Thaniel,” up his ribs go your hands, skating around his back. You play a scale up his spine because you think you might die if you don’t. “I see empires rising and I can make kings to match — I make powerful people and that’s what most everybody wants once they learn what I am, you could ask me — you could, I could make you _anything —“_

And he stops you, thankfully, laying his body all along yours and cushioning his arm under your head so he can kiss you until you forget any future where you’re allowed to finish that sentence.

He called you Keita, is the thing.

In the hospital. He did it deliberately. For married couples and children only, you’d warned him forever ago, and he shook your hand and said, _I’ll see you tomorrow, Keita,_ in front of _everyone._

“I —“ he says, long past the point you remember him responding. “Get to play music whenever I want. My sister,” his mouth is on your jaw now. You feel the edges of his teeth. “Won’t have to stretch every penny of my paycheck.”

“Thaniel — “

“ _And,”_ he pauses, his nose alongside yours, and if you open your eyes it’d be him and nothing but him, roof and sky and constellations all. “You, _you_ do not have to give me anything just to guarantee I will remain yours.”

At that, you scrabble, trying to get bolt upright — except you do not, in your current position, have the leverage to shift Thaniel anywhere.

“That is not — !” you try, indignantly.

And he says, “yes, it was,” as he cups your face in his hands, and for no goddamn good reason other than he likes to do the one thing you don’t see coming, he puts his mouth to your eyebrow and bites it.

*

Coins, dice, raindrops and lightning strikes, chromosomes, and Katsu remain the only things that can catch you by surprise, as they rely purely on random chance and each chance has an equal probability of coming true.

“Sorry — hang on, what was that?”

You look over. Thaniel’s looking back at you like he’s not certain whether he should be offering you a handkerchief, and you run through everything again until you get to, “Chromosomes.”

“I … don’t know what that is.”

“Don’t you? Haven’t they been discovered yet?”

Thaniel lifts his hand in a gesture you take to mean as, _I’m in the Foreign Office six days a week and recent scientific discoveries are not often the subject of conversation unless one of our residents is fighting over a patent._

“Fair enough. How our chromosomes sequence themselves determines our presenting raits — our height, for example, or whose nose we inherit, what our luck with facial hair is going to be —“ you spread your hands, trying to encompass that whole sphere, and it’s as sudden as being shot, the memory of the youngest of your five brothers saying, _you look just like her, what was she like?_ “And there is truly no factor more random that that. It’s pure luck.”

The thing about luck, though, is that a person gets to thinking that because the coin they’ve flipped has landed on tails this many times in a row, then it has to mean that the next one will have a higher chance of being heads, right? Except it’s not. The chances are still even, every time.

Sometimes, in spite of knowing this, in spite of having explained this to multiple people, there are days you come back to Filigree Street wondering how long you have until your luck runs out. You’ve had too many good things happen to you, all at once, and you can’t help how skittish you feel, that the next thing will be the next thing that ruins it all, and you won’t remember it in time to stop it.

You’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

*

By the time you turn eleven, you’ve done almost all you can do to preserve the future of Hagi Castle — and yourself inside of it. The floorboards have told you all the movements of the servants for the next thirty years, since you know you’ll need their help to accomplish it, and you redirect the runoff until the stones in the inner wall tell you there’s nothing left for them to rest on and they’ll collapse. You know you need a particular date but stones don’t tell time the same way you do, so you guess. You’ll need to save those wooden stands, too, the ones the steward intends to throw away; they’ll be necessary for when you’re done collecting your brothers’ armor, some fine spring day in 1867. Or maybe it’ll be ’68 by then. The Gregorian calendar won’t be in widespread use just yet.

You are eleven, and that’s the year you meet Merrick Tremayne.

It begins on a rainy afternoon, when your mother sets her teacup down, swallows, and tells you, “I think it’s time for you to go.”

You take a moment to recall the near futures — one where you stay, one where you don’t — and swallow, too, against a sudden sticky patch in your throat.

“Will it hurt?” you ask, sounding porcelain even to your own ears, breakable. Your fingers knot themselves together.

 _Will it be lonely?_

_Would you rather I be here?_

She does you the courtesy of thinking about it, as the rain plays your vegetable garden like an instrument, leaves ducking under the pressure of invisible fingers. You’d brought in the laundry earlier, before the storm clouds had even gathered over your narrow envelope of sky, and you can see it from where you sit, strung up under the awning; your utilitarian coat, the long sashes of your mother’s house kimono softly crossing over each other in the wind.

She looks back at you, and her eyes soften.

“I’ve already seen it happen,” she tells you, so gentle you want to scream. “I don’t want anyone else to.”

So you get up and thank her, bowing deeply from the waist. You go and gather your coat. You go back quickly to kiss her good-bye, and then you leave the castle grounds before something else can come careening into you, because you have never been more aware of how it feels to be glassine. You pass under the gate with Lord Mori’s seal stamped upon it and head down into town. You don’t falter — why would you? Your feet already know the way. The buildings aren’t quite how you remember them — they aren’t what they’ll be yet — but they won’t change that much. No one stops you.

That, perhaps, is the strangest part of it all. This whole time, you and your mother have lived like you’d been jailed, dutiful and invisible, and then you get up and just … walk away.

If anyone talks about Lord Mori’s bastard son after that, you don’t hear of it, and you won’t hear of your mother’s death, either. For all intents and purposes, she died eleven years ago — she’s just now catching up to it.

You’re in Nagasaki, trying to talk your way into the Dutch division of the East India Company and feeling sick in your teeth from what the stones in the street are telling you, when it hits you. The whole way here, you’d been probing at the future like a sore in your mouth: if you turned around now, would you make it back to your mother in time? Would she smile to see you, exasperated but pleased? Is there a future where she lives? And then, while you are still trying to get them to let you into Dejima, the isolation quarter in the harbor, that stops. There is no future where she is still alive when you return to Hagi, not even if you left this very second, mid-sentence.

The clerk you are speaking to says he needs to get another clerk, and as soon as he’s gone, you crouch down on your heels and stuff the balled-up fabric of your sleeve into your mouth. You stay there until you feel the intention in the hallway, and then you stop screaming. You stand up.

*

“Dejima? That was abolished, I thought. Is this … is this while Japan was still in isolation, then?”

There’d been a pause there, as Thaniel hunted around for a way to phrase the question without making it seem like the answer might reveal something damning about your age, and the result is circuitous. You smile, hiding it in your collar.

“I was born in 1845, while Japan was still ruled by the shogunate, the last of them,” you confirm, speaking slowly because there are still gaps in Thaniel’s Japanese. He’s clumsy with past events; sometimes in a hurry he’ll give up completely and say everything in present tense, then finish it with the denominator of time: “Fanshaw tells me go here, yesterday.” He is not afraid to sound like an idiot, which is gratifying, because nothing kills a second language faster than self-consciousness. “There were laws then, demanding that you kill any foreigner on sight. But the isolation policy ended a few years before I came here. The military, they signed a trade agreement —”

“— at gunpoint?” Thaniel guesses, alert to your tone.

He should know all of this already, you can’t imagine they let him work in the Far East division of the Foreign Office without at least a cursory knowledge of current events. But it’s one thing to learn it in a briefing and another thing to hear it from someone who lived it. It is, after all, not the Far East to you. It is the center of every map you’ve ever drawn.

You lean back against the bench as the train bumps over a bend in the track. The lights inside the carriage briefly illuminate the tunnel walls on either side of you.

“Indeed. We call it ironclad diplomacy, please note the pun and appreciate it, I worked very hard on it —”

“Duly appreciated.”

“— thank you, my dear,” you drop to a murmur, relying heavily on the certainty that none of the other commuters in your compartment can understand you, except Thaniel flashes you the kind of smile that nearly throws that discretion out the window. Your throat solders itself shut, and it takes a moment before you can wedge it open again.

“It would have been pandemonium,” you say, as he covers his smile, rubbing his thumb across it like it can be smudged away, “to try to crowbar every port open at once, so we started with the major ones. Nagasaki had done limited trade throughout isolation, mainly with the Dutch division of the East India Company, so it was our most open port and my best bet for getting out of the country successfully.” A beat. “It helped that I could speak Mandarin. Ito made me learn. Would make me learn.”

Thaniel leans forward, elbows on his knees.

He’s got several questions, you can hear them, but there’s a voice telling him he’s already reached the quota for what you will allow and anything more would be rude, so his intention pulls them back into his mouth.

Quick, just to keep him talking, you answer the unspoken question.

“I’ve learned almost all my languages from the future, yes. I know Mandarin Chinese and I know Russian because there’s a not-unlikely future where one or the other will invade my country and win, and then we’d all have to learn it.”

“You remember that?”

 _I remember a lot of things I wish I didn’t,_ you almost say, except then the future proves you right and the train passes into a leftover patch of tunnel from when they built the Circle line to pass through it, close-knit brick and mortar turning to old river rock, and you have to swallow, hard. Your fingers starfish against the fabric of your trousers.

You feel Thaniel’s eyes on you, watching you hunch away, and then they flick towards the other passengers.

He sits up, and for a moment the breadth of his big shoulders fill the space you’re trying to leave behind. “What is it?”

“The stones,” you say quietly.

The lights in the carriage go out again, then come back on. They sway with it.

“Stones?”

“They tell time differently than we do. Events that will happen one hundred, two hundred years from now are as recent to rock as last week is to you, as next week is to me. This will all be —“ you make a gesture with your hands, meaning _destroyed,_ meaning _obliterated,_ meaning _no one will see it coming and they will die._ “— and it hits me in the face, every time. Just — give me a moment.”

There’s phosphorus in your throat, a sick burning smell.

“Then why in God’s name did you come to London?” Thaniel asks you, aggrieved. “The whole thing was built by Romans, who didn’t think _anything_ was worth doing unless it was done in stone!”

You show him a painful smile, because he already knows the answer to that. You would have suffered so much more than the memories of rocks for the likelihood of him.

*

Most people, you know, have a tendency to think they’ve never accomplished anything of note, not in their whole lives, but you’re pleased to say that’s actually incredibly rare. You find this out when you start tugging on futures besides your own, trying to change this equation or that to make it this outcome or another, and finds it pulls everything else off-center too.

Humans are too interconnected to definitively point at one person and say, _superfluous, get rid of them, they’ll never amount to anything._

Everyone has been a kingmaker to somebody else at some point in their lives, whether they know it or not.

And then — 

Then there are some people who light up the map of the future like they’ve firebombed it.

*

Merrick Tremayne is a drab European man of indeterminate breeding who appears in Hong Kong while you’re there, being lectured by a Dutchman, and you nearly overlook him. 

Englishmen in Hong Kong are two for a dozen — Englishmen speaking bad Chinese in Hong Kong are two for a dozen — and Tremayne is just a gardener, looking for transportation up the Pearl River on the Chinese mainland. His immediate future is full of nothing more exciting than camellia sinensis, and your immediate past is full of you slipping out of your home country and then your attempts to get anyone to take you, an eleven-year-old boy, seriously. Your interest has already moved on, and you step up onto a coil of rope to make room on the narrow gangway for him to squeeze by you —

And then it catches.

Your gaze jerks back to him, an anchor cast out into blind waters and wrenched through the seabed. The noise of shouting and seagulls fades, then mutes altogether.

It’s like seeing the flash of a coin on the street. Curiosity has you checking down that path — 

And the stone goes skipping across Tremayne’s future like a giant had thrown it.

The wild kaleidoscopic turning of images that clamor for your attention are as impossible as they are dizzying: you see man-sized glass cases holding the bones of a Frankenstein tree; green terraces cut out of a mountainous landscape like tiers in a cake; a redheaded corpse with its neck twisted and throttled; whole golden cities floating on wooden frames in the sky. The farthest you can see him, he’s wind-weathered and nearly eighty years old, swollen in the joints and barrel-chested from altitudinal living and tattooed wrist-to-ankle in a design you’ve never seen before and will never see again. He tells you they show his rank as retainer, closer than a bodyguard or translator, and there’s no one single thing he’ll be prouder of than that.

And then, in the middle of it all, the stone lands and sinks into the one place all of it is working towards, where all of it will continue from.

You see the memory of him, already grey-haired by then and a little grizzled around the edges, like someone had painted him in between the lines and that paint was already starting to chip away, and sitting in front of a stone statue, a cup of coffee balanced without a saucer on top of a badly mutilated leg. The look on his face is something Greek, near-Pygmalion in the way his eyes and mouth aren’t quite under his control, made soft and hopeful and wondrous. It’s not something you feel like you should be witness to, even three thousand miles and thirty years away. You swallow, hard.

And then the statue turns his head and starts to smile.

You see nothing from him — he is, after all, stone — and there’s a beat where they adjust, already grinning as they press their foreheads flush together, with feeling — 

— and the joy comes spiraling down the years to you, and you have to sit down — 

— on the Hong Kong docks, three decades prior —

— and put your head between your knees, wondering how that much happiness can make you feel so dizzy.

“— stop barking, you useless Dutch mutt, can’t you see he’s unwell?” a voice says, right above your head, and when you lift your chin and try to get the world to stop rocking — it’s the height, your body’s remembering the height they’d been at, twenty thousand feet up, and oh god you’ve been on top of too many buildings that’ll fall down, you _hate_ heights — you find that younger version of that man has pale eyebrows that slant away from each other, giving him a spaniel’s permanently worried expression.

He moderates his tone. “Are you all right?”

You drag in a deep breath. “Mr Tremayne,” you say, and those eyebrows tick up in shock. “You’re going to need a translator.”

*

Behind the counter at your favorite jeweler’s is a whole selection of magnifying lenses, loupes, and matching minuscule tools, among which is a neat little bit with one magnetized end to make it easier to collect tiny screws. Thaniel pauses, curious.

You aren’t really paying attention to him, because the boys outside have stuck the fourth boy inside a hoop and they’re going to roll him down the street, and you start half-drifting in that direction because you remember that ending badly, and so you miss the moment Thaniel decides to buy it. Next you look, Echelberg already has it boxed up for him.

You blink. Absently, you touch your hat when he bids you both good day.

“If you needed one, you could have borrowed it from me,” you tell Thaniel, stepping past him to hold the door open.

“I know — “ he starts, half-turning to answer you, and you catch him before he can bump into the man on the sidewalk, a red-faced elephantine fellow bent near swaybacked from the weight of the crate he’s taking next door. He sidesteps Thaniel, both of them begging pardon, and comes close enough to the kerb that the cab driver in the road pulls up the reins and slows in precaution, seeing this very large and very visible obstacle, and so does not run down the boy in the hoop when it goes clattering by.

“No, I know,” says Thaniel again, as the rest of the boys follow, whooping joyfully. “It’s for Six, she’d love it.”

“She —“

And you walk into the future with such force you’d swear someone hammered it in at head height, like a wooden beam.

You stop dead, staring.

He’s right, of course. You know that at once.

Six _will_ love it. She’ll give up stealing spoons and will start stealing the screws out of doorknobs instead, and eventually you will show her how to use what she’s collected to make something that can automate on its own. The future lines up with a click so neat you’d think you’d arranged it all, but it wasn’t you.

“What?” His eyebrows hike up. He tucks the box under his elbow self-consciously. “Is that not right?”

You shake your head, struck mute.

It rushes through you, just like that. You love him so terribly you feel like the stevedoring man now heaving his crate up next door’s steps, or any one of the others that are halfpenny for a dozen at the wharfs at Southbank — like you’re twice your own size. You feel like you could split wood with your bare hands or hold your own at sumo or mug someone for their petty cash — or — or — 

Like you could do anything, something you’ve never done before. _Anything._

It’s a fair May day, one year since Thaniel Steepleton came reeling into your workshop, and you have him with you now outside your favorite jeweler’s where you are charged fair for the industrial-grade diamonds you need for your timepieces, and it flattens you to the cobblestones, that you came so far on the memory of loving him and you somehow missed the moment it came true.

Thaniel can’t look at you. His lips twitch out of his control, and he ducks his chin at his feet.

“Mind your face, sir,” comes out of the corner of his mouth. “It’s smiling.”

“It’s doing no such thing,” you argue, despite the fact you know it’s doing exactly that, and you are distantly appalled at yourself, because surely you’re not this man, you’ve never in your _life_ been this man, except for how you’re here and you are.

You step off the kerb and let your arm rest against Thaniel’s for a moment, just because you can.

When he looks at you, the sunlight catches at every bit of color there is in his eyes, and you don’t care what it makes you. You look right back.

*

Later that summer, Japan celebrates the opening of the first railway into Aichi prefecture, connected along the sea route to Tokyo and traveled by a single German steam engine that would make the journey at a pace of about 32kph.

You don’t get a chance to read the paper until the day itself is nearly done, dinner cleared away and Thaniel stooping to get under the table with a broom. Housekeeping in lieu of rent, that had been the agreement when Thaniel moved in — he keeps to it fastidiously, with the precision of a man who’d been forced to live very, very small for a very, very long time and got used to economy of action just to get any living done at all.

The kitchen still holds the lingering aroma from your cooking. It should have been too hot for anything but cold soba and tea, but you’d seen the first of the season’s eggplants available in the stalls behind the teahouse and changed your mind. Food shopping is and has always been one of the best perks of clairvoyance; in the moment you are contemplating your ingredients, you’re remembering the taste of what you’ll make with them. You haven’t cooked yaki nasu since the previous October, so on the strength of fresh eggplants, that’s what dinner became.

You thumb open the paper — 

— and promptly shudder all over, like someone had walked over your grave.

Hearing the chair squeak, Thaniel looks up.

“What was that for?” he asks, amused. You haven’t even started reading yet.

Wordlessly, you pass him the newspaper, waiting as he first automatically checks the left-hand side, then corrects himself and returns to the right, giving his head a shake to dislodge the English and slot the correct language in place.

“Well,” he says after a long moment, his eyes ticking. “You weren’t kidding when you said you really don’t like trains, huh?”

You make a face.

He straightens, like he’d just been jabbed. “Is this the same way you don’t like heights?”

It’s crossed your mind — it wouldn’t be the first time you discovered that your instinctive dislike of something had resulted from the trauma of an event that hasn’t happened yet. If that’s the case, it’s hazy; either you’re not going to be conscious enough to remember it clearly, or other more likely futures are drowning it out. You sit very still, like the memory can’t find you if it can’t see you.

You take too long to reply, because real alarm registers on Thaniel’s face. He puts the broom aside.

“I don’t know!” you say, fast, before he can do something awful, like ask about it. “I have no idea what’s wrong with this railway — or maybe it’s the locomotive. I had to tamper with one in Paris last year —”

This does nothing to reassure him. The whites of his eyes show.

You dismiss it with a gesture. Everything surrounding that event worked out the way you wanted it, so it’s not important.

“— and I’m likely going to have to need to do it again, but am I going to be involved in an accident that’s instilled me with a reasonable fear of trains in all the preceding years? I have no idea. I can’t see any specifics —“

Distantly, you’re aware that you’re speaking way too fast, but you don’t like any of the recent futures and you want to get past the likelihood of them as fast as possible.

“— but I said the same thing about heights, remember —“

“Mori. _Keita.”_

“— and next thing I knew, your wife went missing and the building blew up underneath me and you aren’t telling me about _any_ of it and also, _also_ — you, _what_ did you do with my octopus!”

You wheel on him, but he catches you by the arm. In the same movement, he steps in between your legs and curls down around you, pressing you close against him. Resisting gets you exactly nowhere, so you twist in his arms for form’s sake and then subside.

In defiance of every instinct you have, you allow yourself the indignity of being held.

Here’s a joke for you:

What kind of nightmares does a clairvoyant have?

If it was a good joke, there’d be a pub and possibly an Osaka man involved, but the punchline is you, and the places where you cannot remember what you did and you cannot see the future you’re aiming towards. It’s waiting for a collision and then having to wonder, _did I do that?_

Will you be on a train that crashes? Will you be the one who has to crash the train?

In the shop, something that had been making steady noise is now winding down with a slowing series of clicks — one of the birds, maybe, using the English summer as an excuse to remain active long past the time you program them to quit. Against your ear, Thaniel’s stomach burbles in happy contemplation of dinner, completely oblivious to the moment happening outside in the way of stomachs everywhere. The absurdity of it makes you smile, and just like that, you’re all right again.

You put your hands on Thaniel’s hips and push him back a step.

“I’m fine,” you say, much more levelly. “Let me worry about what might or might not happen. You’ve got better things to be getting on with.”

A Thaniel in the near future says, _But I want to._

Another one says, _If I don’t do it, then who’s going to._

You’re already smiling at both futures before the Thaniel in front of you opens his mouth and says, “That’s a silly thing to ask me to do, when are you not the first thing on my mind?” And then looks immediately horrified with himself. You know the feeling.

To save you both, you let your voice go dry. “That’s because you’re twenty-six.”

He opens his mouth, indignant, but you stand without warning. It brings you flush against him, pressed together along thighs and hips and chests. His mouth snaps shut with an audibly airless noise, and you press your advantage, tipping your head back to meet his eyes. You watch them darken, and he lifts the backs of his knuckles to the exposed column of your throat.

“That has no bearing on what we’re discussing,” he reminds you, voice already deepening, “but I’m willing to be distracted.”

“How magnanimous,” you murmur, and lean up. You feel the whistle of his inhale, greedy against your cheek.

*

There’s a neat trick that the brain plays on the memory, where it skips over the exact record of pain, so one _remembers_ that it hurt, being burned or cut or hit, but doesn’t have the relive the specifics. It means with each new strike pain hits hot and fresh and terrible, but memory will make it dull and livable again, with time.

Soon, you begin to think yours has pulled the same deception on you with Thaniel.

You’ve known from the first moment you woke up remembering him, long before he was born, that he will be killed by Irish nationalists in the Scotland Yard bombing unless you interfere. You cannot approach him before that point, no matter how lonely you get, because you will be invisible to him.

You know he will be your closest friend.

You know he will think about kissing you — whether or not he knows you’re a clairvoyant does little to change that, which you’re pretty sure is why the above fact will always be true — and you know there are at least forty-seven potential futures where he takes the risk.

There are another forty-seven where he talks himself out of it, and at least a few where you’re the one who has to make the first move, but that’s damaging for you both. He is twenty-five when you meet him, and you are nearly forty — you cannot be the one to instigate this part of your relationship. The whole thing is full of tripwires already — you have that written down — and you blame this country, where they do things that makes the stone scream and thought is criminal.

You know that if he meets Grace Carrow, then you can’t interfere at all — if you maneuver her out of the way, she will know it and Thaniel will know it and everything will rot right where it is, and there won’t be any future where your actions change that.

(You weren’t lying. You have no idea how that worked out. You got very leery about heights for awhile, and there was something about the Underground and an explosion at the Nakamura’s place, and then they were divorcing and you have no idea how one thread led to the other. It’s uniquely frustrating, because both Thaniel and Grace would rather jump off a bridge than talk to you about it, so … it’s just going to have to be a mystery, you guess.)

But somehow, in all of this remembering, you’ve skipped over the exact record of it — the effect it has on you.

It’s like getting shocked by a bare light socket, or knocking that tender nerve on the inside of your arm, only on the opposite end of the scale. Thaniel will do something like touch your elbow in the press of a crowd, or say to you “if you’re homesick for it then let me learn to play it for you, what’s it called?”, or stand in the middle of a sunbeam with his head tilted back to appreciate it, and you will feel lit up from the inside out, every part of you full of that swarming insect buzz. The blood will be in your ears, a full percussive orchestra made from the drumming of your pulse, and your heart will pound like it’s trying to beat for both of you. Nathaniel Steepleton is fantastically, fearsomely, fatally loved — and you remember it, every time you rise and check the barometer of your language.

Yes, you can see how your memory might have wanted to protect you from that.

*

After, the two of you have to set the kitchen to rights again.

You fiddle with one of the straps of your braces, trying to get it to lie flat against your shoulder. You hooked it in wrong, you find — you’d been distracted and not watching the future, since Thaniel was still lying flat on his back on the floor with his clothes in complete disarray, hands on his stomach and laughing in breathless giddy snatches, and everything in your brain was currently out to tea so you could pay attention to that. 

You fix the strap, and nudge Thaniel with your toe. “You think this is funny, do you?”

His teeth go on display. “I would never,” he says to you.

“Are you going to stay there, then?”

“I might. You like eclectic installations, don’t you?”

“You have no idea what eclectic is. Everything is eclectic when you’ve got barbarian tastes.”

He laughs again, and almost says, _I like the way we sound together, our names in each other’s voices — I’ve listened to a lot of people talk, and not everyone comes in complimentary colors,_ but doesn’t, because that’s not the kind of thing one says out loud.

You nudge him again, aggravated. “So paint a picture and leave me out of it, you know where the watercolors are.”

If this was last year, it would have shut him up as neatly as if you’d slammed his fingers in the drawer, because that Thaniel still had one foot out the door, waiting for you to decide you’d made a mistake and you were done indulging him: too large, too uncultured, too clerk-ish. But now he just grins at you, and sits up to pull his shirt the right way round again, confident that you don’t mean a word of it.

And it’s funny, isn’t it, that he’s the one who utterly trusts that it’s equal odds, this coin flip on your happiness, and you’re the one jumping at shadows.

You feel like you’re getting away with something you shouldn’t be, every time.

*

The worst part about knowing you will have to shove Merrick Tremayne into the path of an oncoming cannonball is that you genuinely enjoy the man’s company.

It’s not just that he takes your premonitions at face value — and the number of people willing to entertain the warnings of an eleven-year-old boy could be counted on one hand with fingers left over — it’s that here, too, is a man who will wait patiently for twenty-one years to continue a conversation with someone who loves him back.

Mr Tremayne could be ambitious for anything and instead, he will spend almost half his adult life longing for the simplest thing of all: to lie beside him and to wake up to him, again and again.

You rather thought it was an exclusive club, until now.

Of course, _this_ Mr Tremayne doesn’t know that yet. Right now, he’s concerned with not getting himself (or you) shot between here and Canton, where you’ll offload opium for … well, at considerably higher cost than the price of tea in China. You find out quick that his need for a translator is more cultural than technical: he has serviceable Chinese, but people look to you for translation nevertheless; something about the sight of his pale eyebrows and very European nose renders them deaf to whatever comes out of his mouth. You’re just as impatient with it now as you will be when it’s your turn, when you’ve got your own shop in Knightsbridge and everyone speaks in a slow cadence to you at first, then jump guiltily when you come back at them sounding more north country than all their ancestors combined. Mr Tremayne stands back and only smiles a little bit.

You use this time to experiment.

The way your mother talked, you could make wars or end them on the strength of a single gesture, timed correctly, and since you would like it if you _didn’t_ have to shove everyone into an oncoming cannonball — on the assumption that cannonballs are generally hard to come by and if you pull that trick too often people will stop letting you close enough to push them — you start small. Mr Tremayne shows you how to sow seeds, and you start planting them in particular places.

Like the tea seedlings making their upward venture in their germination tray, you sense the way the future begins to change. Small ways; a bush planted in this spot reminds a man where he saw his brother bury the money. A riot of flowers there makes a woman you’ll never meet stop crying, and she sees the bicyclist before she steps into the street.

In a river town in Macao, you buy a painting.

“Is that painter a fellow I’m going to want to watch, then?” Mr Tremayne asks, seeing it wrapped in your hold.

You lift a shoulder. “I have a feeling it’ll be worth something, later,” and he nods.

He’s that way. He’ll cutthroat a buyer down to the last penny, and sells outrageous lies purely on the strength of his worried spaniel eyebrows, but he trusts you to always have an umbrella and never asks you how that is. You’ll recognize this same confidence in every East India Company trader you’ll ever meet.

The two of you spend a wet, muddy spring living out of a tent and trying to get across southern China through the Viet Nam — there’d been no way to avoid having that last job go south, so you make sure you have up-to-date maps of the Hwangzi province before you find yourselves making an abrupt detour south.

Near the end of it, once you’ve crossed into Siam, you’re following a river swollen thick and fast with runoff, and the low-hanging clouds clump along overhead with their faces turned down like they’re trying to eavesdrop, and you have a memory of this river later in the dry season when it’s shrunk back down to the bed. The men will come out with their pants rolled up to their knees, wide-brimmed hats dipping up and down as they fish in the shallows for the minnows that didn’t migrate fast enough to avoid being trapped. You’re holding onto it, trying to keep the memory of the sun on you, to warm you through all your crusted, damp clothes.

Merrick — because he’s Merrick to you now, there are some things you can’t go through without being entitled to the use of a man’s Christian name — snags your arm, pulling you away from the embankment. “Careful,” he says unnecessarily.

“I wouldn’t have fallen,” you say, blankly.

“No, I know. It’s just — look.”

You look. You are at an honest-to-goodness fork in the road.

Merrick watches you patiently. Whereas you feel as bedraggled as a cat pulled out of a sewer, he somehow looks as hale as he had four weeks ago, stepping off the boat upriver past the first blockade, right into an ambush. He’s told you the story of the camel train in Egypt, and you believe it, drab as he is otherwise. Stupid British expeditionary.

You close your eyes and swallow the sourness of that thought — he doesn’t have many trekking days left, for which you’re sorry — and then you throw a stone across both futures.

Your eyes pop open. “That way,” where there’s a town and a transceiver that, if you pull your futures right, could get a message to Sing’s office in Calcutta to let them know you’re alive and are making your way back, in case they care.

“There’s a church there, too,” you remember suddenly. “One of your kind, for Sunday.”

Merrick gives you a bemused look.

“That’s considerate, but I’m not the church-going type.”

“I — oh,” and you blink, because you’ve been living two steps ahead for so long there’s something — you’d assumed — or remembered —

Your eyes dart down to Merrick’s wrist, but of course there’s no rosary there. Not yet.

“Never mind,” you say quickly, and his eyebrows fall to the sides, fond and unquestioning. The only reason you don’t get your hair ruffled is because you step to the side, quick. You will not let him father you. You cannot. You cannot risk his future for the sake of being loved now.

*

It’s a very busy year.

You’re eleven, and then you’re twelve. You see India, Siam, the Korean kingdom, and a lot of flooded fields in China that all start to run together after five hundred miles of them, and each time you chug past Hong Kong, your stomach twists itself up into a knot and you scan for the sight of sailing masts entering the bay.

You will have to decide if it’s worth the risk. Will Merrick Tremayne refrain from crossing the salt line in pursuit of his friend if he is left physically capable of doing so, or will you have to push him?

Is there any future in which you do not maim him that does not end with Britain firebombing Peru?

You wish, not for the first time, that you had a smaller understanding of the future, like your mother did. To see things related only to your own future and not the futures of others — hundreds of thousands of others, the Peruvians on the ground and the Peruvians in their golden city in the sky, all weighted around a decision drab Merrick Tremayne will make about quinine, and whitewood.

You wish you didn’t have to do it.

Or, more accurately, you wish you didn’t have to live with the consequences once you do.

*

You’re in the process of stirring egg yolk into your rice when you first notice it, propped against the steps leading up to the workshop. You set the bowl down.

“Is that what I think it is?” you ask.

Thaniel, up to his elbows in suds, feigns deafness.

You cut your eyes at his back. “That better not be what I think it is.”

Looking at it, you couldn’t say that it was a painting _of_ something, exactly, because the shapes don’t coalesce into any identifiable scene, even allowing for the license of abstraction. But it’s the color — the exact same soft, honey gold of the pocketwatch you’d made for Thaniel, months before the explosion. He’d told you that it was the same color that went across his vision whenever you spoke.

Which means steely grey must be …

“You told me to paint it,” Thaniel points out, reasonably. “Is it any good?”

“The Mozart is better.” It comes out waspish, but Thaniel just shrugs, like, _yes, that’s a given._ “We cannot hang this in our house.”

The challenge lights in his eyes. “Who’s going to know?”

“ _I’d_ know,” and you lurch to your feet. “I have to get to work. That mantelpiece for Mrs Echelburg needs to be finished today.”

And even though you’ve recently instigated a no food in the workshop rule (it’s not necessary; you don’t spill, and Thaniel seems to have learned his lesson about food in the workspace from somewhere before, but it’s a rule you’ll both need to have firmly established by the time Six moves in,) you grab your bowl and climb up the steps, taking care to go around the painting.

The door shuts behind you with a click and the lightbulbs hum to life overhead, and you stand there with your back against the wood, breathing slowly.

Outside, the morning sun lines up perfectly with the gap at the end of Filigree Street, and your workshop is briefly, totally illuminated, everything turned to brass and silver and gold. It’s the kind of day Katsu would have wanted to spend sunning on the front step by the milk bottles. The birds fluff their clockwork feathers. The locust clock opens and closes its wings. When you blink, you can still see the painting where the sun touches the backs of your eyelids. Your hands are shaking; faintly, you hear the rattle of your chopsticks against the lip of your bowl. You set it down.

You haul the door open again.

Thaniel’s head comes up. You step over the canvas and cross the kitchen to him. 

“Tell me what my intentions are,” you say.

He takes one look at your face and grabs a towel to start drying his hands.

“I know I’m young,” he murmurs, shaking it out to hang it back up, “but what’s your excuse?”

“Years of foreknowledge,” you say, and bump him back against the cabinets. “A desire to make the memories I’ve been remembering all my life.” You pull the braces off his shoulders, not gently.

Thaniel grabs you by the elbows, squeezing them into your sides. You tug, but there’s no recent future where he lets you get away with it, so you stop, hands going still. Distantly, you’re aware that you’re breathing like someone had just dragged you up from deep water.

He bumps his face into yours, and you cant into the contact, letting him kiss your eyelid, then the bridge of your nose — places it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to kiss, until you are — and you love him with every single beat of your heart, and you know, because you’ve counted.

You open your eyes. “Come upstairs with me.”

He smiles into your cheek. “We can put the painting in the guest room, no one will see it,” he capitulates, amicably.

“Oh, no you don’t. Bring it with us. You’re going to have to look at it every day, too,” which you know is a stupid thing to say even as you say it, because Thaniel already sees it, all the time. Your names in each other’s voices, he’d said. Gold and steel. Like clockwork.

*

It’s edging over into just a little too warm to be comfortable, and you’ll have to get up and do something about either the fire or the blankets or both, but not just yet: Thaniel’s head is on your chest, tilted just so to watch the underside of your chin — not your most attractive angle, surely. But the only thing you’re feeling from him is lazy, sloe-eyed contentment, no desire whatsoever to move, and a sudden impulse to lick at the sweat visible under your jaw.

“Don’t,” you say out loud, and you feel his skin hitch with his grin.

His ears move when he does that, budging up the sides of his head to make room, and you don’t think it’s something Thaniel knows about himself, that his whole face rearranges when he’s happy. You’ve caught Six trying to mimic it, peering up at him intently to see what the trick is, why he can wiggle his ears and she can’t.

It almost offends you that you didn’t remember this. You’ve waited forty years to get here, the memories well-worn and book-eared from constant checking, and here it comes at you as shockingly unexpected as a gunstock slammed into your knee, that Thaniel Steepleton is full of things that you have yet to learn.

And underneath that, you haven’t stopped marveling that you’re even here at all, where the most pressing future clamoring for your attention is — 

Thaniel’s mouth makes a sudden wet mark across your chin.

You splutter, and shove him off the bed.

*

When the five-masted, sixteen-gunned British ironclads sail into the bay at Canton and raze the city down to its timbers, just to remind everybody who, exactly, will be setting the terms here, you leave Merrick to his mangled leg and his imminent unemployment and start the long trek home.

At port, you stop inside the office and pay to send a telegram to Clement Markham.

Then you leave, secure in the knowledge there’s nothing more you can do to set that future in stone. (No pun intended.) The rest will be up to Merrick.

You’re in no hurry, and so you’re thirteen by the time you make it back to Hagi Castle, where you find that so little has changed it’s almost dizzying, like having stretched yourself to the very end of a tether only to snap back to the second you left.

You’re relatively certain of your reception — you wouldn’t have come back if there was any doubt — but it’s still a shock, to tie the traditional knots into your clothes and pull back your hair into a loose tail and to walk back through the town you hadn’t hesitated over when you left, and to magically have a path clear before you. The older townspeople are first; they glance up, then startle backwards as soon as you register, dropping to their knees in practically the same movement. The younger follow their lead. Your skin prickles, discomforted.

Even at thirteen, you are the astonishing, perfect likeness of your mother.

It’s the strength of this fact that carries you across the bridge to the castle and gets you through the gates, where you find that Lord Mori has stopped making the pilgrimage to Edo, more interested in his oil paintings than in the day-to-day business of governing. That’s all done now by your oldest brother, a big samurai with a bigger voice, an optimistic hope for a beard, and this pervasive idea that it’s fashionable to wear a western suit jacket over his yukata.

“Good god’s balls,” he says, once the problem of you reaches his office, and you nearly touch your forehead to the rug. “You’re Mori Keita.”

Your eyelashes dip in surprise. “Just Keita. I’m not — I’m illegitimate, and not from Lord Mori.”

“Bullshit,” your brother says, cheerfully. “If he wants to take the credit for everything else our mother did through the course of her whole life, then he can bloody well take credit for you, too. I declare it so.”

You lift your head. Your mother hadn’t foreseen this — or if she had, it had been a future too unlikely to take seriously.

 _You will have to outsmart them,_ she’d warned you.

But she’d been thinking of men like her husband, and hadn’t lived long enough to see who her sons would be outside his sphere of influence.

Your brother grins at you in a long-canined way, and gestures at you with both hands. You clamber to your feet. Next to him, you feel knock-kneed and tiny, a child’s timber-and-twig toy of a samurai warrior held up against the real thing.

“— can’t wait to see Isami’s face,” he’s saying, and that, you remember from the near future, is your second eldest brother. “He told us you were coming, but he has this bad habit of being off by weeks or _months,_ sometimes. You can cure him of that, can’t you? Yoshi says you’ve got the best vision of us all.”

You stare up at him, and the next several years of your life burst out of your hands like a spool losing all its thread at once: your brothers will pull you into all their schemes, loud and boisterous and so certain of themselves, kings of their own making, and you will love them so much, more than you’ve loved anyone yet. You will tell them everything you remember of your mother — you got more time with her than they ever did, after all.

The only person who protests will be your eldest cousin Takahiro. 

_He’s the bastard,_ he’ll remind everyone, perplexed and resentful, _and not even a bastard on the worthy side._

And — you remember the absolute gratifying speed with which your brothers close ranks around you. They are, at their heart, samurai caught in the grinding gears of a transforming country. All they want is someone to stand up for, really, who can’t do them the disservice of standing up for themselves. You’ll be immensely accommodating, in that regard.

“All right, then, Mori?” your brother checks, and this time, when you sense you’re about to get your hair ruffled, you don’t duck away.

*

You’d asked Thaniel what he was going to do with you, once it finally dawned on him that you were a clairvoyant of incomparable skill and if he asked, you would rearrange the future for him — and mostly you just want to get it out of the way, whatever it is. Everyone finds a way to use it to their advantage. That’s only natural.

He comes close, once or twice. You sense it, when he nearly asks you to make rubble of the workhouse so Six never has to set foot in it again. But he swallows it down, and you take him by the elbow and you vow to him, “watch me.”

Then, as the summer of his second year at Filigree Street starts to crystalize like honey and leak into autumn, you get your answer.

Without any prompting that you can see, he figures out the trick of lobbing intentions at you just to get you to react, which is rather like having someone come into a room where you’re minding your own business just to throw lemons at your head. You put a hand out to catch them reflexively, and sometimes deeply regret it.

“Oi.” Your voice comes out fractionally higher than normal. “Do you mind?”

Off to your right, Thaniel flushes and ducks his head, yanking his laces straight and saying, “Right, yes. Sorry.”

His intentions veer sideways, and, mollified, you turn back to the lump of pastry dough on your board. You’re not often in the habit of making treats for the Haverly children next door, because they’re terrors on their own and adding sugar to the mix never ends well, but Mrs Haverly is going to receive bad news from her mother as soon as she gets around to opening the morning post, and an excess of baked goods is an excellent excuse to step across to her doorstep and check on her.

Shoving your rolled-up sleeves more securely up your elbows, you reach for your mill flour, and — 

You jerk in surprise. The flour goes across the board and also across yourself.

“ _Thaniel.”_

“Sorry! I’m going, sorry,” and this time, he suits action to words, finishing with his shoes and ducking up the steps to fetch his hat and umbrella from the workshop. The house tells you when the door shuts behind him.

Sighing, you brush yourself off as best you can. There’s a fine tremor running through your hands, and you pause, then cross your wrists over one another. That future’s gone now, so you don’t remember exactly what Thaniel would have done, but your skin is still humming with the phantom sensation of his hands on yours, the way he would have held your wrists together.

“Oh, no,” you say, quietly.

*

It escalates.

You’re in the middle of some mundane chore, usually, sorting rough ready-made cogs from a new supplier or scraping soap flakes into the laundry — you are not, in other words, doing anything where you might anticipate an advance.

Then, suddenly, in your near future there’s a hand hitching high on your leg, or a mouth opening against the back of your neck. Your skin prickles. Heat floods down your spine preemptively, and you feel your own head jerk up like a firecracker’s gone off too close to your face. You scan for Thaniel, who’s nearby, placidly resetting the alarms on the stopwatches or bringing you more hot water for the laundry, and his face is the picture of innocence — except for how, for a moment, he absolutely _intends_ to reach for you, to plant his hand on your leg or a kiss against your neck.

Realizing what he’s up to, you strive not to give him a reaction, but sometimes it’s out of your control — your leg jerks reflexively, or you inhale too suddenly in the quiet, and out of the corner of your eye you see him smile.

And then — and this is what, in your admittedly biased opinion, makes him far more intolerable than Ito or Kuroda or anyone who wanted you to sow fields of dead bodies — he gets up and leaves the room, and you forget any recent future where he touches you, leaving you utterly baffled as to why your body is humming out of your control.

He does this several times, as time passes and autumn cools and congeals around the city.

Once, when you’re delivering a finished commission to a residence near Whitehall and get sidetracked into trimming hedges and moving loose paving stones so that the burglar who comes through here two months from now puts his foot down wrong and doesn’t even succeed in breaking into the house where otherwise everything would have gone abysmally wrong and he’d have to slit that brown-haired woman’s throat, the police get called on you for suspicious lurking. Scotland Yard is near enough to the Foreign Office that you’re waiting on the pavement when Thaniel gets off work. He puts his coat over his arm, his face lightening.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, pleased.

You shrug. “I got arrested.”

A brief burst of violence happens in response, a memory both future and past, Thaniel saying, _next time you’re going to have to answer to someone your own size,_ but as his eyes flick up-and-down to reassure himself you aren’t hurt, he relaxes.

“Did you deserve it?”

“For being foreign in the wrong neighborhood? Yes, criminally.”

He laughs, and the two of you set off together towards the Westminster underground station. You’ve no money left after the Yard, so Thaniel buys your tickets and you descend the stairs to stand on the crowded wooden platform with all the other dark suits and umbrellas. The women are the only bright things to look at.

“You’ve dirt on your hands,” he observes.

“Yes,” you hold them out for inspection. Merrick always said English tea roses were God’s own proof of His facetiousness and His schadenfruede for man’s suffering. You had to relocate a couple. Their delicate constitutions will not survive that small inconvenience.

Thaniel puts his hand under yours, turning it over to see where the scratches across your knuckles have reddened.

Without warning, your near future has your back against the sooty bricks inside the tunnel, in a room that is functionally, at best, a boiler room, with Thaniel against your front hot as a furnace. You go hot with memory, and sway in place. When you jerk your eyes up, Thaniel seems oblivious. There are people on every side.

“Thaniel,” you say, very, very quietly, with what you think is a great measure of patience. “I may have a fund set aside to bribe us out of gaol but that’s only if we don’t _both_ land in gaol in the _first place.”_

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, look, the train.”

*

His goal with all this, as far as you can tell, is to tease you with intentions until you are too ferociously aroused to think straight, thoroughly sidetracked, and helpless to go to him without looking like a loon.

“Really?” you snap the drawer shut. Inside, something goes _bang!_ in protest. “A clairvoyant in your house and _this_ is what you’re going to use it for?”

“ _That’s_ your objection?” Thaniel says from the door. “Out of everything?”

You stand.

“Workshop’s off-limits,” you inform him briskly, “there’s too many ways it can go wrong.” 

You reach out so all the electric lights pop off at once, and his hands find your face unerringly in the dark, pulling you up into him. You think, with a falling sort of inevitability that comes with not having written some key things down out of a particular upper-class Japanese prudishness, that you are going to have sex in a distressing number of other locations in your own house.

Oh, well.

*

Occasionally, and usually with a warning from you, Thaniel camps out in his old room just for the sake of making it look lived in, on the not-unlikely chance you get nosy intruders. You’re in there now, fixing the top drawer of the dresser, which sticks despite being new. Seeing the places where you had to patch in repairs make you miss Katsu in an aching, formless way. You’d hoped he would have found his way back by now, wherever he went off to — if someone had snatched him, you would have felt their intent to dismantle and sell him, and you haven’t. He’s just … _gone._

At the other end of the room, under the window with its diamond-shaped panes of glass, Thaniel’s watching you tinker, absent-mindedly rolling the end of his pen back and forth across his mouth. His thoughts are hazy, suspended; the snatches you get from him are mostly in colors, which probably means music.

So when it comes, his eyes dragging a track from your hip to the base of your neck, it’s not so much with _intent_ as it is a suggestion. He’s contemplating it. The possibility is easy to ignore, at least until — 

You slap a hand flat to the top of the dresser, gripping the corner hard enough that the noise you can’t stifle in time is half present pain, half future pleasure.

Thaniel jumps.

You hear the pen clatter to the floorboards.

Involuntarily, you rock forward onto the balls of your feet; it’s unmistakable, what the shift of your hips is.

“ _Christ,”_ he breathes, and in a few steps has crossed the room, shutting the door to the hallway with a snap. The possibility of that future dims, too, like it’s been left out on the stairs. “I’m sorry, Keita, I was just daydreaming — for real that time, I didn’t mean — I wasn’t being cruel —“

He stops, helplessly, and you drop your forehead forward.

Sweat breaks out in places you haven’t even been touched yet, and — not to steal a phrase, but good god’s balls, are you really about to get fucked against the dresser in your spare bedroom? No wonder past you didn’t write that down, how ridiculous.

“That’s nice,” you manage, when Thaniel hesitates, trying to decide what the least awful option would be. “But will you _please_ follow through this time?”

A beat.

There’s a scuff that’s him nearly tripping in his haste, and then his hands are on you, palming up your thighs to your hips to your ribs, pulling you back against his chest. It nearly lifts you clear off your feet with his enthusiasm. The both of you inhale sharply in unison.

“Tell me,” he says, desperately, hot against your ear. You crane to give him room to kiss your throat. “Keita, tell me what my intentions are, I can’t — I can’t think it through.”

And.

Then.

Another time, after coming back from one of his rehearsals and feeling light with secondhand giddiness from Thaniel who saw more colors today than their orchestra has managed before, the both of you sit down to share the piano bench as an excuse not to go to bed yet. What starts as a highlight reel from the night’s program becomes a call and response, him and you predicting him, your hands crossing each other at times. This piano bench would have been fine if Thaniel were an ordinary-sized person, but he isn’t, and his knee nudges up against yours. You jostle his elbow. You — 

The memory comes up sudden, the piano lid slamming closed and you pressed down on top of it, and your body flushes hard. It’s been well-trained by now.

You reach out and pin Thaniel’s hand to the keys, stopping the music with a discordant bang.

“Are you _sure_ I can’t make you a king?” you say, somewhat desperately.

There’s a lot of color in Thaniel’s eyes, and more rising in his face to meet it. He stares you down.

“Now why would I want that?”

“Just to give me a break,” you try, “I have limits,” but you’re already turning into him and he frees his hand to catch your face with it, and any future where you have his heart right next to your own is preferable to any that aren’t.

(You don’t quite make love on top of the piano. You still have some sense left, thank you.)

One Sunday in late October, when there’s no rehearsal and no trips to see Six at school and the weather’s turned as soggy as a damp towel, too miserable to even want to venture further than the end of the street for more coffee beans, you spend the whole day in bed. You see no one and no one sees you, except for each other and the steel-gold painting you finally hung over the dresser. It’s a strange sensation, like being drunk, the way the edges of you feel smudged out of place, like so much proximity with Thaniel’s skin and you start forgetting where your own ends.

It’s only towards the end of the day, as you’re sitting at your desk and pulling your journal out before you lose the last of the light, that you realize you have today’s date already written down.

The desk is close enough to the bed that Thaniel has one hand threaded through the slats in the chair back while he drowses, so he only has to stretch a knuckle to make contact with your spine, and as you read the entry — _you will not be more than an arm’s length from him_ — you feel yourself starting to smile stupidly. You hadn’t set out to make today true, and you were right anyway.

“You’re a marvel, you know,” he says to you, softly, another day.

You’re sitting cross-legged on the parlor floor, his head in your lap. You’d been feeding him English verses for him to translate into Japanese, and enjoying the way his face changed when he got it right and heard the rhyme come through. Poetry is always most tolerable in its original language.

“I didn’t write them,” you protest. 

Your foot’s asleep. You’re not going to move.

His mouth skews. “Don’t dodge, I’m trying to pay you a compliment.”

“That’s not —“

He reaches over his head, palming your mouth shut, before letting his hand slide to your cheek. His thumb against the skin under your eye makes you forget words, at least for a breath or two.

“Listen. You think you’re the culmination of all the machinations of the clairvoyants who came before, and that you’ve got a responsibility, I get that, and I know _you_ know that everyone who knows what you can do is very, very careful to keep you in their pockets while secretly wanting you dead because it’d be easier —“

“You’re not very good at compliments.”

“— I’m _getting_ there, you fossil, if you’d just let me — and if they’re not wanting you dead for their own peace of mind they want you spying for them and what I’m _trying_ to say is that I’ve known you for almost two years and you keep using your abilities to do nice things for children and help to find my police superintendant a wife.”

“You didn’t see me,” you say, with difficulty, “before you.”

“Do you?” he fires back. “Resemble that person at all? Your vision doesn’t go that way.”

Your throat moves. Nothing comes out.

He lifts a shoulder. “And anyway, I just wanted you to have some fun with it, that’s all.”

Your spine curves down. You touch your temple to his. His thumb still brushes back and forth across your cheek, the way people check eggshells for warmth.

“Does this mean you’re going to stop trying to incite me into acts of indecent public assault?” you ask, dryly, and up close, you feel his ears move.

“Maybe,” he allows, “maybe I can show some restraint.”

Within the hour, however, he has you naked and on your back on the rug (“what’s wrong with our bed? I’m getting too old for routine rug burn, Thaniel,” and he says, “mmmhm,” absolutely not listening, “keep up, will you?”) He lies across your legs to hold you still, chin tipped so close to your stomach the fine hairs there keep shifting with his every exhale.

He grins up the length of your body at you, and the future goes sharp and _intent —_

— your back arches, hands clenching into fists — it’ll be so good you feel it in your _scalp —_

— and then that future snaps loose like thread yanked off a coat, and he’s _not_ — he _doesn’t_ — and your jaw goes tight with frustration. You feel his eyes on you, waiting until your breathing returns to normal, and then the intent comes roaring right back.

You’re going to kill him.

You love him, but you’re going to drop a building on him and you’ll tell everyone he deserved it and Six will be the only one who believes you, because she’s the only other one who knows Thaniel is interesting enough to want to kill.

“Thaniel, Christ —“

“Hm. Yes, did you need something?”

He props his chin on his fist and quirks his eyebrows at you, the picture of profound unconcern, and before you can drag the proclivities of his ancestors into question his head inclines fractionally, and —

“ _Shit!”_

To your chagrin, he succeeds in making you come like that, without touching you at all.

When your hearing returns, you complain to the ceiling, “That’s not fair.”

And, “I’ve stopped _wars.”_

“Bully for you,” Thaniel murmurs, with no small amount of smugness, and then, “I’m going to kiss you now.”

“Oh, _now_ you’re — ?”

Except, of course, this time he actually does, and that’s Thaniel for you, you think ruefully. Even when he’s telegraphing his intentions to you plainly, he still manages to find a way to catch you off guard. You start smiling, and it grows so wide he mostly winds up kissing your teeth.

*

And you can deny it all you want, Mori Keita, but here it is.

The proof that you, your clockwork heart, your ruthless probability engine of a brain — all of it works no more and no less differently than anyone else’s. 

Love reduces you to foolishness, quick to blush and quicker to smile, same as every other lovestruck person who’s come before you.

And you, the kingmaker, do not need to roust anyone out of Whitehall, because Thaniel Steepleton makes you feel like there are empires already inside of you, vast tracts of claimed land, and when he puts his hands on you he makes you king inside yourself.

*

You go to Cornwall for Christmas — you and Thaniel, and his sister Annabel and the boys, too. 

They look better for a year of decent meals and wrangling by matrons. This was one of the two cruxes in the settlement between Mr and Mrs Steepleton: the refurbished house in Kensington in exchange for tuition for Thaniel’s nephews. How they managed that with Grace’s mouth-breathing boar of a father, you’ll never know. Thaniel undertook it all on his own, and there’s never a future in which he intends to tell you about it. Your accent remains stubbornly northern.

You haven’t been in a room with Grace Carrow (formerly Steepleton, now Matsumoto) since the award ceremony last year, which you think is a shame because you’ve forgotten why you used to dislike her so much. You know you did — you have it written down — but whatever that future was, it’s gone now, and you’ve never been much for a habit of grudge-holding. Thaniel does that just fine on his own.

Still, when you saw them the day before the wedding, the boys had been a miserly, pointy-faced pair, and they aren’t that anymore. So if nothing else, there’s that.

 _We’ll have Six with us,_ you promise yourself. _By this time next year._

It’s been a long day for them, a sleeper from Edinburgh to London and now down to the coast, and by the time the road narrows and begins to flatten out towards the familiar pine cliffs and the sea, the boys are squabbling in a way that had started out as good-natured and swiftly turned sour. The carriage comes around the last turn towards Heligan, and not even Annabel’s swift inhale, a small trod-upon noise that you hear in Thaniel sometimes too, can distract them.

“When you said house …” 

“It is,” you answer the unfinished question. “It’s a whole collection of greenhouses, too. My old tutor was a botanist.”

“Oh,” is all she can manage.

Annabel is long the same way Thaniel is large. Her face, her nose, her hands and fingers are all as stretched as if, at some point past, someone had gotten into an argument over her and their tug-of-war pulled her out of shape. She clearly doesn’t know what to make of you; the fact that she’ll instinctively say no to your every offer of hospitality means you’re struggling to find things to say to her. Thaniel had done the same thing when he first met you, it’s true, but then there’d been a bombing to distract him.

You’re relieved to disembark. The wind froths up, making you grab for your hat to keep it from being snatched away — and stretching out a hand to catch Thaniel’s, which is.

“Mr Mori!”

You pass the hat back and turn around.

Minna, Clement Markham’s widow, comes down from the house to receive you. When you get to her, she reaches for you with both hands, kissing you on the cheek with that complete disregard for propriety that, as an archaeologist’s wife, she’d dumped to the side like unnecessary luggage and cheerfully never bothered with again. Rather like you, she has too much money to worry about which rules apply to her and which don’t.

You’d been seventeen when you first met her, away at school on the eastern side of the island with the youngest of your five brothers, and Merrick took up work at the British Legation twenty minutes down the road — it would have been a startling coincidence, if it was possible for coincidences to happen around you. The East India Company had been swallowed up by Her Majesty’s government practically overnight, and all his ruthless expeditionary practicality had to be shunted into playing the part of the civil servant — and so, by extension, he had a lot of extra energy to spend fathering you in the way he hadn’t been allowed to before, as your employer. He walked without a cane, aided by the whitewood band you never saw but knew he had, wore a rosary around his wrist, and his eyes were different: here, at last, was your mirror, the desolate madcap look of someone who’d just woken up to exactly how much time needed to be filled, how much waiting there was left to do.

And fear. That he’d never be all right — or _worse,_ that he would be. That he’d move on, and forget him, and thus never know what it’ll be like to be loved back.

You’d been grateful for the arrival of Minna and her then four-year-old daughter, in that it redirected some of Merrick’s aggressive paternal attention. He brought them to one of your cricket games, this small mousy brown woman and her ferociously redheaded child, and your brother took one look at her bright smile and promptly tripped face-first into a goal post.

“I don’t even care that she’s an English troll, and old!” he’d whispered to you afterwards, gripping your arm white-knuckled. “Kei, she’s marvelous!”

“Mori Yoshiaki, she is a widow, and _not_ interested.”

“No, I know! You can feel her future too, right? One hundred percent less man and she’ll do _amazing_ for herself. Oh, look, my hands are shaking.”

Privately, you thought this had more to do with the fact your brother had no experience with disconcertingly kindhearted attention from women for his own sake, instead of just politely alarmed interest for Lord Mori’s son — but part of you will always love Minna Markham a little bit, for how infatuated she’d made your brother, at least for a little while. You feel it in your smile, when you squeeze her hands back.

“It’s always good to have you,” she’s saying, and the wind makes a low wail coming around the turrets of the main house. It plucks at the greys in her hair.

“Hello, Minna.” You have to raise your voice to be heard. “This place looks even better than I remember it.”

“Oh, that’s all Cecily’s doing, of course. I just live here. Merrick’s not coming,” she adds, abrupt. “I don’t think. Usually I’d’ve heard from him by now, if he was,” and there it is, the chink in her unflappable good cheer. “He left everything … very tidy, and it’s been a long time since his last letter. I’m not sure he’ll come back at all.”

She’s asking you, you realize.

“He won’t,” you agree. Behind you, Thaniel finally solves the argument between his nephews by grabbing one boy by the scruff and hefting him onto his shoulders, out of reach of the other.

You glance in his direction, and smile. The joy in it, you know, doesn’t fit quite right on your face, because it isn’t yours. It’s so much closer now than the first time you felt it, eleven years old and taken out at the kneecaps; that absolute soaring sense of height and devotion you’d remembered in Merrick’s future.

“He won’t be back,” you say again, and Minna, who’d opened her mouth, closes it again. “His saint is awake.”

*

Minna and Annabel take to each other immediately, one competent woman to another, and so you go into the house to spring whatever surprise Cecily Markham thinks she can catch you with. She’s outgrown whistling “Ode to Joy” whenever you entered a room, which is too bad, because now you catch yourself doing that on your own.

“That’s Joy, isn’t it?” she shouts from somewhere further in the house. “Oh, blast, you’re early.”

“No, I’m not, I knew exactly when I was going to arrive. And I’ve brought family.”

The exchange was in Japanese, and so Thaniel startles against your elbow, shooting you a tellingly undefended look, but Minna and Annabel — busy navigating stairs and trunks and two over-entergetic helpers — don’t even blink. You catch him by the jacket, and warn him where the mistletoe is.

Cecily, daughter of the redheaded corpse you had no trouble helping to make, is only a year younger than Thaniel, and a musician, too.

You’d thought this would be enough to get the conversation going, but Cecily and Thaniel take one look at each other and bristle suspiciously. Since you remember a whole lifetime of them being friends, you’re frankly put out.

“Stop that,” you say to them in exasperation, in the anteroom before dinner.

Your head feels heavy, weighed down with Cecily’s iron intention to tell her mother in no uncertain terms to stop meddling, and Thaniel’s intent to do something similar, albeit in a very nonaggressive, Thaniel-ish way. You rub the back of your neck. Beside you, half-obscured by a vase of greenhouse flowers, is the painting you found in the Macao prefecture when you were a child. You wonder if you should tell the Markhams they’ve got a few thousand pound’s worth of a famous artist in their anteroom.

To Thaniel you say, quiet, “She’s like us,” and they give you identical blank looks.

Cecily Markham gets there first. 

Her auburn eyebrows shoot up. “ _Oh,”_ she says, and since there’s only one thing in this world one uses that exact tone of “oh” for, Thaniel twitches with realization. The sudden burst of feeling — relief and delight; the camaraderie that comes with being the same type of criminal — has all three of you looking at your shoes, heartfelt and embarrassed, right before the dinner bell rings.

With that threat now boxed up and buried, Cecily and Thaniel take to each other in the way musical people do, like they’re all continuing the same conversation and can pick it up from one another with no hesitation. You’d met orchestra members with the same sort of hive mind.

“How’d he wrap you into all this, then?” she asks him at some point, between the ham and the party crackers.

“He broke into my flat and washed all my dishes,” he responds before you can say anything, and Cecily bursts into laughter: unselfconscious and surprisingly graceless and genuine, too. Minna spares them a fond look, but her attention is swiftly recaptured; the boys have found a willingly admirer in her.

You protest this character assassination.

“What,” Thaniel says blithely. “You didn’t know I was going to say that?”

“ _You_ never know what you’re going to say, how am _I_ supposed to know what you’re going to say?”

His eyes crinkle up, the same way they do when you have a bowl already in hand for him at breakfast, or the kettle just finished boiling right as he comes through the door — the pleased, startled shyness of it makes you think you said something completely different. Before you can put a hand out to stop him, he swipes a paper crown from the table and props it on your head.

 _Kingmaker,_ he mouths at you, and turns back to Cecily before you do something insane.

Unconsciously, your hand drifts out to the side, at the height of Six’s head — and it strikes you hard, somewhere soft and undefended, that once you have her, all of your important people will be right here in Merrick’s house with you.

*

Your time runs out.

Hagi Castle has been in your family for nearly three hundred years, but your ancestors and your house gods were relocated there from further south. The daimyo of the previous era had a cousin who was also his most loyal general, who defected to the Tokugawans when it looked like the war against them wasn’t going favorably. As the Tokugawans would render the emperor obsolete, establish the shogunate, and rule Japan for centuries, it turned out to be a canny decision on his part.

He assumed he would get to keep his ancestral land. He was wrong. As reward for coming swanning in at the eleventh hour, House Mori was moved to Hagi, in Choshu.

They never quite forgave that.

Privately, treasonously, you think the Tokugawans were probably right not to show any favoritism to such a fairweather friend.

Three hundred years later, and your brothers have a full inheritance; money, land, and loathing for the shogun.

Instead of doing anything to direct their energies, Lord Mori possums his way out of any responsibility and passes away uneventfully in his sleep. Your oldest brother gains access to all of Hagi’s resources, and suddenly, a place that had scarcely moved for centuries gets shoved into the present. 

There’s an emperor to champion, and a shogun growing weaker and weaker in his country’s eyes the more he capitulates to foreign demand. Your house is full of chest-pounding and nationalism, but more than that, it’s full of a lot of delegates from Satsuma dressed in plain clothes and carrying papers they don’t want anyone to see. 

Their intentions make your teeth hurt.

Your brothers get themselves locked in a loop, feeding off of each other. Their clairvoyance makes them reckless. The likelihood of the future doesn’t matter; if they want it, if they see it, they don’t see why they shouldn’t have it. Watching them stumble around in it is like watching five blind mice in a larder, but there’s no way you can point that out to them. Your brothers have given you everything.

Instead, you pull up the young men in town for training, because this rebellion will need samurai, and while you have everything your mother never foresaw for you — schooling, connections, the dignity of a surname and the protection that comes with it — you are still the bastard child, and you cannot legally carry a sword. You don’t need to; you teach everyone around you to instead.

The atmosphere reminds you of the awful feeling of the bay at Canton. You keep feeling your eyes jerk up to somewhere in the middle future, expecting ironclads, and you’re dazed to see Hagi, just Hagi, with its crumbling inner wall and its tropical flowers all on display.

You unravel and re-roll the future like a ball of yarn, again and again, trying to find a path — any path —

Where they don’t — they aren’t —

And then you go, and you’re gone, and Tokugawa Yoshinobu abdicates all his power to the emperor, and you collect the armor of your five dead brothers from a field near Kyoto.

Only one set can be reassembled, bullet-ridden, to be mounted on a stand in the castle hallway. Yoshi’s.

It is 1867. You are twenty-two years old.

The night before the battle, you tore a whole section out of your journal. Those ragged pages are the first place the spine falls open to, now. You burned them and you can’t know what they would have said, but you have a guess: pages and pages of the lives your brothers would have had, their loves and their children and the jokes they would have told you, if only you were a little bit more near-sighted.

If only Japan, your country, the place you love above all other mothers, didn’t need that boy on the throne.

*

You’ll think of this, twenty or so years later, when Yuki Nakamura the would-be assassin sticks his chin out at you and demands you treat him like an adult, and you respond by calling him Yuki-kun. He is fifteen.

Your emperor hadn’t been any older, when men had died for him.

*

Your cousin Takahiro becomes Lord Mori, and everything condenses into a matter of waiting.

He demotes you, then demotes you again, until the position you occupy in Hagi Castle isn’t even that of servant, but something even the servants can look down on. They’re forbidden to speak to you, but they manage it anyway, usually by holding conversations with themselves or each other in your vicinity and speaking deliberately somewhere to the left of where you’re standing.

It’s actually very kind of them, because usually you pick up what they intend to tell you without them having to put themselves at risk. You can honor a matter of principle when you see one.

You’re surprised it hasn’t occurred to Takahiro to banish you the way your mother had been banished. That would be the exact kind of cruelty that would appeal to him, trapping you in the same small space where your ghost mother died, to make a similar ghost out of you. Instead, you cover your wrists and make excuses for the condition of your face, and you wait.

Once a year, Matsumoto Akira is foisted off as your responsibility though some whim of Matsumoto-sama’s that nobody bothers to explain. You teach him English. He tries repeatedly to steal your journal. It occupies you both, him trying to outsmart the traps you lay for him.

You wait.

Ito arrives, and the inner stone wall collapses and kills Takahiro in a manner you hope was quite painful.

You wait. You answer the questions from the coroner and then the accountants, and no one will tell you, but your abject calmness is alarming everyone. You sign the paperwork surrendering Hagi Castle and its surrounding prefecture to the emperor, and then it’s done.

Somehow, unbeknownst to you, you find there’s something for you: your brothers left you the townhouse in Shibuya, as well as House Mori’s eastern estate, the house in Yokohama where the previous Lord Mori had spent so much time before becoming a recluse. Previously, there had never been any future in which you got to see it. Takahiro, of course, never intended to tell you, so you couldn’t have known.

A familiar glassine feeling crusts you over. You freeze where you are standing.

“Well?” says Ito.

“I’ll go,” you say, “but only for ten years.”

“We’ll see,” says Ito.

And then it’s to Tokyo, where you work and wait and work.

It’s a web not unlike the one your mother spent her whole life missing, and you grow adept at manipulating politics in the same way people become adept at cooking when suddenly finding themselves on their own; not out of any real interest so much as a desire not to starve. At a certain level, everything becomes a numbers game, and it’s hard to leave well enough alone, so you don’t try.

It’s the decision to shove Merrick, again and again. One person on the scales today saves forty thousand lives tomorrow.

You gain a reputation for cruelty.

The people you speak to have a tendency to come down with an abrupt case of death, and you can’t very well tell anyone that killing them is the _last_ resort, thank you. If you’re doing your job right, no one should see it at all.

You look so much like your brothers, people tell you. Such a shame.

The more time passes, the more you imagine your glass crust growing thicker. Maybe you can block it out, every person who wants to tell you whose corpse your face belongs to.

You reach your lowest point about a year after you take the job spying for Ito.

It’s spring and the house finches are busy scrounging for nesting material, darting in and out the gap in the shutters — you feel their little intentions, soft as raindrops on the future’s surface — 

— and then you wake up with a fuzzy mouth and bruises on your hips and find your English is gone.

You reach for it and it’s not there. Neither is your Mandarin. Neither is your Russian. You cannot remember a single word of the French you picked up from the baking course you’ll take early in your stay in Knightsbridge. For once, it’s not because somebody intends to shoot you before the day is over — you already know how it feels to lose your language because of that.

No, it’s because it’s likely you’ll end yourself if you continue on this track.

It’s an illuminating moment, one of the signposts of your life. If you were a clairvoyant standing outside of yourself and threw a stone across your future, this would be one of the moments that rippled.

This is you, at rock bottom.

You are where your mother warned you you would be. Nothing left except a language.

The thought of her is like blood returning to a dead limb. You prickle painfully, all over. Ashamed, you take care sliding out from under the arm slung across your chest.

Kuroda Kiyotaka doesn’t stir. At this proximity, you smell nothing from him but the alcohol still seeping slowly up from his pores. When you flick a stone across his future, you see that he will not remember this if you leave right now, but if you stay here just because his bed is partially better than your loneliness, he will make your clairvoyance his weapon. He is too smart not to figure it out.

Your mother taught you better than that.

You are not and will not be the most powerful man in the room, but you will always have to be smarter than those that are.

The glass cracks.

You wait, and it takes years, and then Kuroda walks into the trap you set for him.

You were right: he was black-out drunk and doesn’t remember seducing you, but it wasn’t so long ago he stood on the deck of a ship in Hakodate Bay and accepted surrender from the shogun’s Admiral Enomoto, and hasn’t since lost the taste for making other people lose, and he watches you sometimes like the instinct is there, like his hand might know your body if he reached for you. You’re grateful that your past is fuzzier than your future is: there’s no recent future where you kiss him again, so you’re saved from the sense memory of his tongue up against your palate. The fact you had been hungry for it at the time is enough to make your insides squirm.

After hearing you out, he scrubs his bristly chin in a thoughtless way and says shortly, “What’s in it for you, what do you want?”

And you’re so tired from the sleepless nights you’re going to have soon that you can’t even come up with a lie fast enough.

“I want to go home,” you say, shoulders sloping, and shake your head when Kuroda tips his chin with uncanny precision in the direction of Shibuya. “No. Never mind.”

Kuroda wants the world on a platter, a clear-cut path to victory, the kind of thing they compose songs and show costumes for. All you want is to say good morning with the accent Thaniel passed down to you. All you want is a future where someone takes his shoes off inside the door and is glad to see you.

Kuroda squints at you. “Are you defecting?”

“No, don’t be stupid.”

You don’t care about the welfare of any country the way you do Japan’s. Haven’t you proved that?

You wait. 

When your ten years for Ito are up, he won’t let you go.

You resort to threatening his wife, he evicts you from the country in a rage, and with something like relief you emigrate to Cornwall, sorting out your visa in time for Christmas. You spend it at Merrick’s house, entertained and a little terrified by the intensity with which Cecily Markham draws everyone into her schemes. You haven’t seen her since she was a small child, but she hasn’t forgotten you.

“Do you know how many tutors have tried to correct my handwriting after you taught me?” she scolds you, sounding almost pleased.

“Nonsense,” you say. “You need to have something that remains, should everything else go dark.”

Merrick intends to leave her the house, although you don’t think she knows it yet. Once he and his childless aunt pass, there will be no more Tremaynes left, and Heligan is something of an archaeological find on its own.

Merrick himself, in many ways, is already gone. The smile he gives you is faded, like a book cover left out in the sun. It’s the same smile you’ve been giving people for ten years, impatient with the present and wanting the future already. Merrick will not return to England after this, and it’s unlikely you will ever go to visit him — not at that altitude. 

Thinking about fireflies, you ask him for a jar of pollen. His smile is instant, more genuine, and you experience a brief, wild sting of envy.

His wait is over, but you still have three years.

You go to London, where nothing ever warms up and the sunlight comes through as palely pathetic as the tea, and you establish a shop in the part of Knightsbridge with minimal amounts of stone. The talkative wood reminds you of home; everything in Hagi had something to say.

You wait.

You wait through the initial suspicion of your neighbors, who aren’t sure who to complain about regarding “that small oriental one” since you dress like them and sound like you’re from Hull, and you build a clientele of semi-decent people who _don’t_ intend to call you a chinaman as soon as your back’s turned. You get tired of everyone else, and dye your hair to stand out less. Out of spite, you build toys using techniques that haven’t been invented yet. You sell your clockwork to Queen Victoria. And the Viceroy of Rhodesia. And the Tsarina of Russia. At least two rival artificers try to dissuade you from working, and upon rebuff they escalate into attempted murder, but they’re so bad at it it’s more a novelty than anything. 

You wait.

They announce the establishment of an oriental village in Hyde Park, practically in your backyard, to celebrate the opening of Japan to the west. You imagine the objection to your culture being reduced to a novelty to export is part of why the Tokugawan shogunate had kept the sakoku going for so long.

You wait.

The newspapers are awash with anti-Irish sentiment following the bombing of Victoria Station, and your hands begin to tremble.

Six months to go, two months, one — 

— and then there’s no more waiting left to be done, and you back through the door with tea tray in hand and there’s Nathaniel Steepleton, parched the cinder dust color of tombstones, and bleeding onto your floor.

*

“It must get dull,” Thaniel offers, very quietly.

You had felt the shape of him wanting to speak for several minutes, but he couldn’t decide on the words, so you’d been keeping quiet while you waited for them. He ducks his head against the back of your neck, and you settle your hand over his on your chest, lining up each of your fingers with his, just because.

When he hesitates, not wanting to elaborate, you lift your head fractionally to show you’re listening.

“It’s just —“ he gets out, reluctant. “I would think it’d get dull, knowing that you were always going to end up here. None of this is new to you, Keita. It’s — it’s already familiar, and — and worn out.”

And you do not have to remember a future in which you make him say it to know that what he’s really asking you is: _are you bored?_

Or, _what will it take before I am too familiar and worn out?_

Which is so — 

— _so_ — 

You flip over, so fast Thaniel’s hands splay open around the shape you were just in, and push yourself upright so you can grab him by the shoulders. You lean over him, and he takes your whole weight.

“I don’t think you _understand,”_ you hiss, with a ferocity that makes him physically startle back from you. The whites of his eyes are almost blue in the dark. “I have spent my _whole life_ remembering you. I was homesick for _you,_ for this, before you were even _born.”_

Through Hagi, through Nagasaki, through India and Siam, through Canton and Tokyo and stupid Paris with its stupid stone monuments, from your brothers to your cousin to Merrick and his saint to Ito and Kuroda to Grace Carrow, you carried it ticking away inside of you, this thing that all of your cogs and wheels move in time to — the aching, heartfelt wish that you — 

You, Mori Keita, watchmaker, fortunemaker, a kingmaker like your mother before you —

— that you would be allowed to have this, and to keep it, too.

“To _have_ you here, under my hands, in spite of _everything,”_ you hear yourself say, still in that unhinged voice. “It’s … it’s …”

And then you have to stop, because Thaniel isn’t breathing.

You ease your grip, skating your palms over his neck, his shoulders, finding the patterns you know are there with your fingers, the freckles that look like someone had just flecked pencil shavings over him. Your cheeks are hot. You lean down, pressing one against his ear.

“No,” you whisper. “It’s not dull. It’s the opposite of dull.”

“All right,” says Thaniel Steepleton, and his arms come up around you. “All right, then. Keita.”

You feel how the future shifts, the moment he believes you, and it comes shining through you gold and sharp — and absolutely stunning.

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> *singsong* take one down, pass it around, 99 wips in the google doc ~ !
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](https://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/613984157788471296/).


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